Top 5: Things I Learned in High School

Surprisingly, my high school looks a lot like this. Only, you know, it was less impressionistic.

Ah, high school. It wasn't by any means my "golden years", but it taught me a lot about getting over hang-ups with people, culture, and one-dimensional authority figures. The educational system is indeed "the system" yet raging against it sadly won't make much of a difference unless you convince a thousand others to do it too. Here are five extra-curricular bits I learned in high school:

5.) Pity the popular kids, for they wash up faster than a child star's post-pubescent acting career.

4.) Teachers are entirely human and get treated more like high school students than like average, middle-aged respected professionals. This includes, but is not limited to, being picked on for being "weird", taking on way too many projects and responsibilities, getting dreams stomped on by authority figures, and being thought of and labeled as something they aren't at all like.

3.) Feel awkward eating fried cafeteria food with whatever table will take you while working on writing existential  poetry? Just skip lunch! The library is all yours!

Pictured: My sanctuary envisioned via photography by Ahmet Ertug. 

2.) That horribly feared and anticipated "senior thesis" is actually just a research paper and will likely be one of the easiest things to churn out every few weeks in college.

1.) Always, always, always EJECT Firewires, USB drives, and SD cards before yanking them out of a computer. Every time you don't eject, your technology teacher goes just a tiny bit more insane.

Honorable Mentions:

• Always back up an important assignment in two or more mediums. If it's saved on your computer, put in on a USB drive/email it to yourself as an attachment/email it to yourself copy and pasted in the body/put it on Google Docs/save it as an email draft/put it in cloud storage in other areas (Windows Cloud, Zoho, etc.) and go ahead and print two copies of it anyway, just in case.

• Freaking out about things solves nothing.

• High school is the perfect time to have eighty bazillion hobbies to occupy all that time between getting schoolwork done really early and being able to leave the room when a little chirp tells you so.